Lost London 1870-1945

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Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. In The Daily Telegraph, Tim Robey found, "It went alright on the night, with no hideous glitches", adding that, "Breaking new ground with this live experiment was only a matter of time, and single-take gambits of its ilk have been dabbled in for years. I actually collect old photographs myself, so the subject matter is naturally of interest to me, but this informative book also taught me an awful lot that I didn’t know about London in days gone by. Within the course of one night, Woody Harrelson finds himself in a misadventure in London that winds him up in jail. There are pictures of beautiful buildings that were destroyed in air raids or wilfully demolished because they can.

There’s the odd under-visited museum like the one at the end of Brunel the Elder’s Wondrous Tunnel (129), the first underwater tunnel, opened in 1843. Modern technology and smaller GoPro type cameras have allowed for this type of film to be executed, but it is also well choreographed. Harrelson acknowledges his debt to the mesmeric German thriller Victoria, with its similar sense of urban emergency. Des photos du vieux Londres disparu, à la netteté remarquable, émaillent chaque page de cet ouvrage. Not to mention upholstery trimmers, laundry workers and the 20,000 seamstresses annually who were kept busy during the brief period of The Season, only to be put out of work immediately at its end.It is a true social documentary trove and "Spanning a period of 75 years from the mid 1870s to 1945, [the photographs] depict a world in transition. A must read for anyone with an interest in London and the UKs industrial/urban cultural inheritance which is scandalously and often deceitfully played down (or as shown here, wantonly destroyed) in favour of a bucolic English utopia that almost certainly never existed. Light shelf wear to tips, corners, and edges of the book and jacket, top edge dusty else clean and unmarked.

The architectural vocabulary is strong in this book, and I was gasping for a glossary long before the end, my residual understanding of spandrels being inadequate.One of the pleasures of this book was photographs of buildings and rooms that were used by Dickens in his novels.

I prefered this book over the larger and possibly more lavish Panorama version for the additional small images of back street life that this gives - squalor, yes, but also a realistic view of life in Victorian London and into the early 20th Century until wars and development overtook the city. With impressive illustrations and commentary the author has conveyed the utter misery of the population in those times. They are taken from the LCC collection, now held by English Heritage and are strikingly sharp and detailed.

This is the London that Dickens would have known, and such images bring his street urchins vividly to life. In a few months time, these cards will only be available on line from this site since they are a limited edition. I only spotted one howler: Percy Bysshe Shelley didn’t marry Mary Wollstonecraft, but her daughter, Mary Godwin. There are, he suggests, existing monuments that could happily be lost, and one or two lost ones that could just as happily be reclaimed.